The last futile,
expensive,
and grotesquelyimmoral war launched
by the United States was authored by those ideological shape-shifters and creatures
of legend, the neoconservatives
(neocons for short), whose storied history has been the subject of endless books,
articles, and memoirs.
There’s even a documentary film
in which the aforesaid neocons tout their own intellectual importance in what
has got to be one of the most extravagant displays of narcissism since… well,
since Narcissus.
As the details of their ideological hegira from Left to Right are so well known
– I’ve covered
the subject in detail over the years – suffice to say that these
worthies were the real intellectual authors of the Iraq war.

But I’m getting ahead of myself: In order to bamboozle the American public
into believing that this was a defensive
and justifiable
war, the neocons and their allies came up with various
arguments – Iraq’s alleged
"weapons of mass destruction," his purportedplans
to attack his neighbors, and his supposed
ability to threaten the continental U.S. – but their central if only implied
talking point was that Saddam was in some way instrumental in bringing about
the 9/11 terrorist attacks. For the
most part, this was not stated explicitly; the idea was to link Saddam and
Osama by referring to them in
the same sentence. Yet the implication was clear, and the
administration and its media
amen corner returned to this theme again
and again, arguing that we had to strike Iraq in answer to al-Qaeda’s
murderous sneak attack.

The campaign to link the two figures in the public mind was so successful that,
to this day, there are a large number of people who believe Saddam Hussein authored
the 9/11 attacks, long after this narrative has been debunked
to the bone.

The Democrats took out after this narrative last
year, rightly pointing out that the links between Saddam and 9/11 were nonexistent
and gleefully pointing
to Afghanistan as the "forgotten" front in the war on terrorism,
which they claimed had been shamefully neglected by the incompetent Bushies.
Once they were in power, they averred during the campaign, they’d fix that by
pouring more troops into Afghanistan, and going
after alleged al-Qaeda units operating in Pakistan’s untamed tribal areas.
These "national security
Democrats," as they defensively called themselves – to differentiate
themselves, I guess, from your regular run-of-the-mill Democratic surrender-monkeys
– replicated the neocon strategy, first, with a think-tank: the Center
for a New American Security, founded in 2007 and funded, as the Wall
Street Journalreports,
by "foundations such as the Rockefeller Brothers Fund," as well as
"some government money to study particular issues."

In those (few short) years in the political wilderness, CNAS churned out policy
papers and allied with the "centrist" Clintonian wing of the party.
More recently, co-founder Michele
Flournoy authored a
study [.pdf] that argued against a fixed timetable for withdrawal from Iraq.
Like President Obama, they have repeated essentially the
same rationale for the Af-Pak war as the Bush administration and its apologists
spun for the Iraq invasion – it’s being billed as a proactive strike against
terrorist enemies who are "plotting" strikes against America. This
argument, however, is no more convincing coming from left-neocons than it was
coming out of the mouths of Bush, Cheney, and the PNAC crowd. Osama bin Laden
is long gone from Afghanistan, if he’s even still alive – which Pakistan’s president
rather doubts – and as for
the whole question of "terrorist sanctuaries" and the supposed danger
this poses to the continental United States, I agree with Matt
Yglesias’ trenchant analysis:

"Plotting doesn’t strike me as a particularly space-intensive activity.
When the ThinkProgress team gets together to plot, we usually do it in a small
confined space. More generally, the entire safe haven concept strikes me as
overrated. The 9/11 attacks were primarily plotted in Hamburg. A terrorist in
the Swat Valley is, by definition, not in a position to blow something up in
a Western city."

Like the neocons, who came together as a reaction
[.pdf] against the perceived
pantywaistedness of the antiwar Democrats of the 1970s, CNAS was conceived
in response to the Republican charge that the Democrats are "soft"
on national security issues. CNAS set out to prove them wrong and proceeded
to build a case for widening the "war on terrorism" to include not
only Afghanistan but also Pakistan.
Ready with their policy prescriptions when the Obamaites were swept into power,
CNAS personnel flooded into the new administration (John
Podesta, head of the Obama transition team, is on the CNAS board).

In a bit of synchronicity that we would do well to note, Flournoy has been
appointed to take over Douglas
Feith‘s old domain: the Pentagon’s policy shop, where the neocons prepared
the Kool-Aid for general distribution.

CNAS is behind
the new counterinsurgency strategy championed by the neoconservatives before
their exile from the corridors of power and advanced by their hero, Gen.
David Petraeus, in the army’s new counterinsurgency
manual [.pdf]. As opposed to the ham-handed slash-and-burn
methods of the early years in Iraq, the new militarist dispensation is based
on the concept of conducting a political and economic war, complementing and
reinforcing the element of pure coercion.

"Clear,
hold, and build" is the slogan of the new militarism, and it is one
uniquely suited to the demands of an expansive, albeit "liberal,"
interventionism masquerading as "internationalism." Set for a long-term
occupation of Afghanistan – and quite possibly large portions of neighboring
Pakistan – the CNAS-niks are committed to the concept of war as essentially
a social engineering project. Their chief guru, John Nagl, boasts of the new
military doctrine’s ability to "change
entire societies."

CNAS is the new American Enterprise Institute in that it is left-neocon central
in the way that AEI and PNAC performed a similar function during the Bush years.
A look at the CNAS board
of directors – an institution where Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin, the Albright
Group and Armitage International, the Center for American Progress and the Hoover
Institution all have a place at the table – provides a few key clues as to its
provenance and mission.

The establishment is facing a popular uprising on several fronts, and foreign
policy is no exception. There is a general, though inchoate, rebellion against
the idea that we have to intervene all over the world, especially given our
present economic straits. The Iraq war has soured a new generation on the idea
of America as a world-savior, as Vietnam did the previous one, and the left-neocons
pushing the Af-Pak war are facing an uphill fight in the long run, although
they may hold the temporary advantage of serving under a popular president.

It’s early yet, and already voices are being raised – on the Left as well as
the anti-Obama Right – against the widening of the Afghan war and the incursions
into Pakistan. Yet the War Party has one big advantage.

Groups like CNAS are financed to the hilt by big corporate interests and the
politically connected plutocrats who profit from war and our foreign policy
of global intervention. Their intellectual handmaidens in the growing constellation
of left-neocon Washington outfits are nothing but the latest window-dressing
for the same warmongering, corporatist agenda.

I can’t help but look and marvel at the disparate character of their antipode
– this Web site. They’re spending millions to promote the same old militaristic
blather, albeit under the banner of an ersatz liberalism, while we’re in the
midst of a fundraising drive to raise a relatively measly $70,000 to continue
operating. I’ll bet CNAS, which is feeding at the federal trough, spends that
much every quarter on lunch!

Our seasonal fundraising drive is just kicking in, and it kills me to look
at the highly uneven playing field, with a plethora of political and corporate
interests ganging up to continue the same discredited interventionist policies
that have poisoned our relations with the rest of the world for the past eight
years – and longer.

Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin aren’t paying our bills, and there’s no antiwar
equivalent to the corporate and government moguls who populate the CNAS board
of directors. The War Party outguns us when it comes to finances and connections
to the Washington elite, yet they feel obligated to attack us, as CNAS senior
fellow and Washington Post Pentagon correspondent Tom
Ricks did recently on his ForeignPolicy.com blog. It’s a David-and-Goliath
scene, with the stone in our slingshot being the support of the American people.
Yet if we are to continue to reach Americans, and the rest of the world, we
need your financial support. Unlike CNAS, and their equivalents on the Right,
we don’t have any big corporate interests backing us – and we don’t take government
money, and would never consider doing so.

If you’re an American taxpayer, you don’t have a choice about funding CNAS,
no matter what you think of their viewpoint. However, you do have a choice when
it comes to supporting Antiwar.com – and we wouldn’t have it any other way.
I just hope that you make the right choice, and that’s why I’m doing my best
to convince you that contributing to Antiwar.com is essential right now.

In an age of intellectual conformity and lockstep "Left" and "Right"
party lines – both of which seem to agree on the merits of our eternal "war
on terrorism" – Antiwar.com is more necessary than ever before. And Antiwar.com
is such a great resource, even if you don’t always (or ever) agree with our
worldview. It’s fair to say this Web site is the single most comprehensive news-and-comment
portal covering the foreign policy front. That’s why our audience is bigger
than a good many "mainstream" media outlets.

Yet we don’t have mainstream money, and that’s where you come in. We’ve always
depended on the support of our readers, and we’re turning to you once again.
As war clouds gather on the not-so-distant horizon, it’s more important than
ever to keep independent reporting on foreign policy alive and well. Contribute
today.

Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com, and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute. He is a contributing editor at The American Conservative, and writes a monthly column for Chronicles. He is the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement [Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993; Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2000], and An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard [Prometheus Books, 2000].